The Memphis Safe Task Force was out in numbers on this warm October evening, swarming across the grounds of a dreary extended-stay motel on the city’s north side.

As security cameras rolled, a Memphis Police Department (MPD) officer went inside and slipped behind the front counter while a federal immigration agent stood watch from the lobby. Behind the desk, the MPD officer hopped on the motel’s computer.

With a series of keystrokes — but no warrant — he entered scores of the motel guests’ personal data into his own mobile device.

“I got scared because I don’t know whether to tell them yes or no,” a motel employee later told a reporter, saying she was too afraid and uncertain of her rights to tell the officers no.

An investigation by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found the Memphis Safe Task Force is making aggressive sweeps through hotels and motels across the city, several in low-income areas and Hispanic neighborhoods where numbers of immigrants lacking permanent legal status live. The sweeps pose troubling legal questions regarding the delicate balance between public safety and the constitutionally protected right against unreasonable search and seizure.

A member of the Memphis Safe Task Force at a motel site last month (Photo: Micaela Watts)

Legal experts interviewed for this story said officers are treading on treacherous ground in aggressively seeking motel registries. Technically, police can ask permission to see registries without a warrant, but hotel proprietors are within their rights to refuse to share the information to protect the privacy of guests.

“The Supreme Court has held that hotels have a privacy interest in their guest registries, and the police have to obtain a warrant [to get them],” said David Raybin, a Nashville-based defense and civil rights attorney and a former prosecutor.

There is risk involved, too. Within the last decade, a motel chain was forced to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement for jeopardizing guests’ privacy interests by providing registries to immigrant enforcement agents in Washington state.

And because of the power differential between police and individuals they encounter, many people are too intimidated to realize they don’t have to comply.

“Police officers know that a show of force will oftentimes make people nervous and confused. That nervousness will often cause them to comply with the request without questioning it,” said Memphis criminal defense attorney Claiborne Ferguson. “There is a built-in compliance lever, anytime police show up in mass, with guns and raid jackets or body armor.”

**Members of the Memphis Safe Task Force climb into a Dodge SUV last month.** Photo: Erika Konig

Memphis Safe Task Force spokesperson Ryan Guay told The Institute in an email that the motel sweeps are legal and are based on solid investigative leads.

“These efforts are part of targeted enforcement strategies aimed at locating fugitives, recovering missing persons, and addressing violent crime patterns in specific areas. The selection of hotels or motels is based on credible leads, intelligence, and investigative necessity, not broad or indiscriminate canvassing,” said Guay, who serves as supervisory deputy for the U.S. Marshals Service.

“Regarding the legal framework, we operate within the boundaries of the Constitution, statutory authority, and judicial precedent. We do not condone nor do we operate based on intimidation, and respect for individual rights and business protocols remain a cornerstone of our approach.”

More troubling to some is the Memphis Police Department’s involvement in these operations that started September 29th, after President Donald Trump launched the Memphis Safe Task Force by deploying hundreds of federal agents into the city accompanied by state troopers and National Guard personnel.

In a controversial development last month, Memphis Mayor Paul Young said MPD is cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — a radical departure from past statements by city leaders who tried to reassure Hispanic leaders that the city’s police did not check people’s immigration status. Young contended that MPD is steering its ICE teammates away from immigration enforcement to helping the city solve murders and other violent crimes.

But critics aren’t buying it.

“I am very concerned about what these people will do with that information. It is possible that, if they obtain work permits or documentation that has people’s home addresses, that information could be used in the future,” said Mauricio Calvo, president of Latino Memphis, an advocacy organization that works extensively with immigrants.

Calvo said MPD’s involvement in seeking motel guest details as part of teams that include federal immigration agents is troubling.

“It just breaks the trust and credibility that the mayor had when he said to the Latino community — and I was there when he said it in the public forum at the church a few weeks ago — that they are only working together [to] direct them to crime issues,” he said.

The mayor’s office did not respond to requests seeking comment. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the Memphis Safe Task Force. Task force spokesperson Guay, in turn, downplayed immigration enforcement as a factor in the sweeps but did not rule it out either.

“… The Memphis Safe Task Force does not exclusively engage in immigration enforcement. Our operational focus is, and has always been, on identifying and apprehending violent offenders, regardless of immigration status. Guest information does not historically or typically include citizenship-related details, and such information does not factor into Task Force enforcement decisions or priorities,” he said.

Aggressive tactics

From the get-go, the task force’s marching orders involved aggressive policing. In announcing the creation of the task force on September 15th, President Trump said its objective is “to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent” through “hypervigilant policing, aggressive prosecution, complex investigations, financial enforcement, and large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel.”

Initially, it wasn’t clear if MPD would participate in the task force’s operations. But Mayor Young said resisting the federal surge in the way Chicago officials have done would only bring harsher tactics. Soon, the city administration embraced the extra manpower.

At least one MPD officer was embedded with agents from ICE, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other agencies last month when they descended on the motel in the city’s north side. As agents swarmed across the property, an MPD officer from the Appling Farms Station entered the motel lobby accompanied by an agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an operational branch of ICE.

The MPD officer asked a motel employee to share the guest registry. No warrant was provided, according to the employee, who asked to not be named for fear of retaliation. She told The Institute that she had never faced such a request from law enforcement before. She worried she would be arrested if she refused to share the details.

The employee recounted what happened once she agreed to share the guest registry details:

First, she opened the hotel’s internal database of guests. Then, one by one, the MPD officer went through the details of each guest and the accompanying identification documents they had provided — passports, driver’s licenses, and more. The MPD officer then entered the details of each guest into a database on his mobile device, potentially looking for pending warrants or other reasons of interest.

During the database search, the officer identified one person with an active warrant registered as a motel guest. The ensemble of agents then headed to the room but did not find the person.

The Institute found that the task force paid similar visits to multiple hotels and motels across Memphis. Several owners and employees said that prior to the task force, they had not experienced law enforcement officials requesting to view their guest registries without a warrant.

One hotel owner said he had instructed his receptionist to refuse to share guest details if agents did not present a warrant. “You need to take care of the guests’ privacy, too,” he said, requesting his name not be mentioned due to fear of retaliation.

But other owners and employees have chosen to comply with the requests. They offered two primary reasons. For one, they didn’t know their rights in such a situation. And as defense attorney Ferguson noted, “It’s unlikely the police officer would have told them what their rights were. They don’t have to necessarily notify them of those rights.”

The other reason was that when so many agents came into their lobbies, the hotel employees said they felt pressure to do as the task force members asked. “I don’t want to get in trouble, you know?” said a motel employee who complied with the task force’s request.

Stella Yarbrough, legal director at the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said some hotels and motels will provide guest details simply because they believe the police must be operating within the law.

“There’s this assumption of good faith — that when they’re asking you to do something, it must be perfectly legal, and that they wouldn’t ask you something that would be violative of your rights,” she said.

Yarbrough also questioned whether gathering motel registries could make MPD complicit in immigration enforcement — the very thing Mayor Young said that city police are trying to avoid. Once the task force obtains the motel guest data, there’s no guarantee that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) won’t use it to locate and arrest immigrants, she said.

“DHS could be using it to target individuals,” Yarbrough said. “[That] could include pulling everyone who has a foreign passport, and running their information through all kinds of databases. That would be a concern,” she said.

Legal controversy

Legal rulings make it clear that hotel and motel employees would be within their rights to refuse sharing guest records with law enforcement officials in the absence of a warrant.

In a landmark 2015 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a Los Angeles ordinance that required hotel and motel owners to make their guest registries available to police officers whenever requested to do so. In the case, the City of Los Angeles vs. Patel, hotel owners argued that they had a privacy interest in keeping guest information private and that the ordinance violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

Yarbrough also pointed to a 2019 case, in which the Motel 6 chain agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the state of Washington after several motels in the state provided information about thousands of guests to ICE without warrants.

The office of then-Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson had said at the time that Motel 6 had shared the information of about 80,000 guests in the state from 2015 to 2017.

According to a statement by the attorney general’s office, information sharing by Motel 6 had led to targeted ICE investigations of guests with Latino-sounding names. Many guests had faced questioning from ICE, detainment, or deportation as a result. “Motel 6’s actions tore families apart and violated the privacy rights of tens of thousands of Washingtonians,” Ferguson said.

Motel 6 agreed to pay $12 million as part of the settlement and signed a legally binding commitment to no longer share guest information without a warrant or other lawful basis, at any of its locations nationwide.

Washington state’s lawsuit argued that the motel chain’s actions had violated the state’s consumer protection and anti-discrimination laws.

Referring to the situation playing out in Memphis, Yarbrough said, “There could be some state consumer protection laws that could be helpful to people who have their information disclosed, but Tennessee’s consumer protection law is perhaps a little wanting. … It’s from 1977 and so it doesn’t totally deal a lot with the new state of how information is exchanged.”

A more recent law, the Tennessee Information Protection Act, which came into effect in July, only deals with very large businesses, such as those with an annual revenue exceeding $25 million.

“So I doubt that applies to any of the hotels in Memphis,” Yarbrough said.

Meghnad Bose is an assistant professor of practice in the University of Memphis’ Department of Journalism and Strategic Media and a staff writer for the Institute for Public Service Reporting. Before joining The Institute, he was a reporter and Delacorte Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review.

Erika Konig is an intern for the Institute for Public Service Reporting. A senior journalism student at the University of Memphis, she is a first-generation college student and a naturalized citizen from Mexico. She graduated summa cum laude from Southwest Tennessee Community College before enrolling last spring in the U of M.

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